Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [148]
“But what . . . ?”
“Possession. Nine points. Especially when it takes a year to get anything into court. They could have cleaned it out before we could get a judgment. But the Kid there got a tip, and he and Jack Hill were waiting for them with rifles. So now there’s a door on their tunnel, barred on our side, and we’ve still got possession.”
Their tone left Susan uncertain whether to be appalled or amused. They acted like boys playing robbers. Frank, a self-conscious juvenile, flapped the reins on the horses’ rumps. “Why Frank,” she said, “that sounds heroic. How many men?”
“Five.”
“And they had guns?”
“We’ve got ’em now.”
“Ugh,” she said, shivering her shoulders. “Weren’t you frightened?”
“Scared to death. But as Jack says, a Winchester is mighty comprehensive.”
“I don’t like it,” she said. “It sounds grim, it sounds like war. What are they doing now? Did they give up?”
“They’re the ones who have to take it to court,” Oliver said. “Right now, all they can do is sit on the porch at the Highland Chief boardinghouse and give us hard looks as we ride past. So we carry six shooters and carbines. They’re so scared of the Kid they don’t dare do anything.”
“Don’t you believe him,” Frank said. “He’s the one they’re scared of. The boss is a very good shot, did you know? Under all that trusting good nature is a very tough hombre. Every day or so we hold target practice outside the shaft house at noon, so Oliver can knock off a few cans at fifty yards. The word gets around.”
Laughing, baring his perfect teeth into the wind, he pounded a hand on his thigh. “Here,” Oliver said, reaching. “Let me spell you.”
Studying her husband’s face curiously, Susan decided that he did not look like a tough hombre. He looked like a man without either meanness or impatience. But he did look tired. She supposed the strain of being constantly on guard had worn on him. It all sounded unpleasant and dangerous, but there was always the possibility that they were playing an old Western game, telling bear stories to the tenderfoot. “Goodness,” she said lightly, “and all the time I thought I was married to a mine manager, not a gunman.”
The hooded head turned slightly, the wind-reddened, tear-glassy blue eyes looked at her sidelong. A strange, almost unpleasant smile lurked under the soup-strainer mustache. “Well,” he said, holding her eyes, “that’s Leadville. That’s what we chose.”
Shocked, she stared back at him while her mind translated for her: That’s what you chose. Was that what he meant? He looked embarrassed, and heaved around to check on Ollie. On the way back from adjusting the buffalo robe, his right arm hugged her briefly. “Hi-up, there!” he said, and plucked the whip from its socket and laid it on one haunch, then the other.
Susan, huddled into herself, kept still. It had stopped snowing. The meadow they were crossing was as bleak as midwinter, scratched like an etching with gray and black trees. The shore boulders of the black, swift creek they forded were shelled in ice. The wind searched out the cracks in her covering and froze up her will to talk. Her mind was as torpid as her limbs. She would be worrying as soon as she thawed out, but she couldn’t worry when she was so cold. Perhaps she had imagined that look of blame, that unpleasant smile. After a while she pulled the blanket clear over her head, and took her dismay into the dark.
Brief words passed above her, separated by long silences. Several times Oliver’s arm braced her shoulders when the road got rough; she wondered if he were being especially protective because of what he had let slip. From the careful quiet with which he occasionally leaned back to check on Ollie, she knew that her son still slept.
A long time of stupefying cold. The wind came through her blanket as if through cheesecloth. She hunched her shoulders and clenched her jaws and endured.
Then she realized that the lurch for which she was braced had no returning lurch. The buggy had stopped. Oliver’s weight left the springed seat, she heard him grunt as he hit the